Economics

Progress

Toilets and jobs in India

Oct 9th 2012, 19:35by M.C.K. | WASHINGTON

WHEN politicians, pundits, and economists talk about “infrastructure investment”, they generally refer to glamorous projects like new airports, high-speed rail lines, or giant bridges. That kind of spending might make sense in rich countries, where labour productivity is already high and extra time is worth a lot of extra money. But in poorer countries, governments should first focus on satisfying more basic needs, as illustrated by a fascinating article in today’s Financial Times:

In dozens of crowded homes in Budaun’s largely Muslim suburb of Navada, residents defecate on the cement floor of a fly-infested cubicle usually separated only by a curtain from the rest of the house. In exchange for a few rupees and food, Parmeshwari and fellow members of the Hindu Balmiki caste pass by each day to lift the metal flaps that give access to the stinking privies from the street outside, scoop up the waste and take it away.

“We ourselves have no toilets at all,” says Parmeshwari, one of more than 600m Indians who lack even primitive toilet facilities and therefore practise what is known as open defecation.

But now, it seems, the Indian establishment is beginning to realise the awful price in deaths and disease that the country and its 1.2bn people have paid for failing to build modern lavatories and sewerage.

“India’s sanitation challenge, especially in rural India, remains humungous,” Jairam Ramesh, minister of rural development, said in September at an event to publicise the central government’s latest hygiene drive.

Some 400,000-500,000 children under five die each year from diarrhoea in India, “largely caused by unhygienic practices including improper disposal of human excreta”, Mr Ramesh said. “Cleanliness is more important than godliness in this country.”

Incidentally, this reminds me of the recent NBER working paper by Robert Gordon, an economist at America’s Northwestern University, which was discussed on this blog a few weeks ago. Mr Gordon’s overarching thesis was remarkably unconvincing. He was very persuasive, however, when he argued that the standard of living improved significantly as clean running water became a normal part of daily life (emphasis in original):

The biggest inconvenience was the lack of running water. Every drop of water for laundry, cooking, and indoor chamber pots had to be hauled in by the housewife, and wastewater hauled out. The average North Carolina housewife in 1885 had to walk 148 miles per year while carrying 35 tons of water.5 Coal or wood for open-hearth fires had to be carried in and ashes had to be collected and carried out. There was no more important event that liberated women than the invention of running water and indoor plumbing, which happened in urban America between 1890 and 1930.

[…]

While the railroad connected the cities, there were horses on every urban street. Within the cities, steam power was not practical, so everything was hauled by horses. The average horse produced 20 to 50 pounds of manure and a gallon of urine daily, applied without restraint to stables and streets. The daily amount of manure worked out to between 5 and 10 tons per urban square mile, all requiring disgusting human labor to remove. The low standard of living reflected not just the small amount that people could purchase but also the amount of effort at the workplace and at home where they had to expend to perform ordinary tasks.

Life expectancy was only 45 years in 1870, compared to 79 years recently. Why? Infant mortality resulted from poor sanitation, water-transmitted diseases, and contaminated milk. The first attempts at urban sanitation infrastructure emptied the waste into the rivers because there was a theory at that time that rivers were self-cleansing.

The other thing I thought of while reading the FT article was that, as with many other industries, technological progress could lead to widespread job loss among low-skill laborers, even if everyone else ends up better off:

Parmeshwari, a 60-year-old widow, is a so-called manual scavenger, one of hundreds of thousands of Indians whose low-caste occupation for generations has been to clean out villagers’ primitive toilets by hand and brush, collect the fecal matter in baskets and handcarts and dump it away from the houses.

[…]

Less than two years ago, most homes in the farming village of Urulia, near Budaun, had unhygienic “dry” toilets serviced by manual scavengers. Today all have lavatories that are flushed with water and connected to underground septic tanks or “leach pits”.

“Now diarrhoea is reduced, cholera is [under] control, and there are fewer flies,” says Zakir Ali, an unemployed householder and member of the village’s health and sanitation committee. “Before we had to depend on someone [to clean] and if they did not turn up for three days there would be a lot of maintenance.”

It is possible that Ms Parmeshwari and other “manual scavengers” will be able to find healthier lines of work, especially if the Indian economy regains its vigour. As Mr Gordon noted in his paper, women in the West were not deprived of gainful employment after having been liberated from the task of fetching clean water. Still, one has to wonder what will happen to all the people destined to be replaced by pipes.